Osam feels the love for Klopp
League of Ireland legend Paul Osam has hailed Jurgen Klopp as the most inspirational manager in football.
“I don’t support anyone from the English Premier League, I will watch any football, but I look at what Klopp has done to get the best out of players and it impresses me,” says the Ireland U16 Head Coach.
“I don’t know him but from interviews and articles about him he seems very humble and very honest. One thing that sticks with me after is after Liverpool won the Champions League he embraced everyone, Spurs players too.
“You could see the sincerity in those bear hugs. You can see it’s important to him that he needs to be part of the group, that he needs to be credible, sincere and love the players and have the players love him back. I think that goes a long way in getting performances from the players.”
Liverpool also feature in a famous game in which Osam tells FAI.ie he would love to have been involved as a coach. But when he talks about ‘The Miracle Of Istanbul’, it’s into the shoes of AC Milan’s Carlo Ancelotti he wishes he could have stepped.
“To be 3-0 up and go on and lose a game from that point is really tough, and it’s happened to me when we were 3-0 ahead at half-time against Denmark but lost the game 4-3 (in an U16 friendly in 2017 when one Troy Parrott had given Ireland an early lead). The learning Ancelotti would have taken from a game of that magnitude would have been massive.
“Why I would have loved to have coached that game is it’s a massive challenge to keep your players motivated in that position. Inadvertently they can take their foot off the pedal and the opposition in that situation can only get better in the second half. It’s like planning for a completely new game at half-time.
“I would love to be in that position again, because I got it wrong against Denmark, so to have a similar scenario in a Champions League final, I would like to think I would have done things differently to what I had done previously and got the win.”
